Morning Call
by Cutter
Summary: Hisoka's thoughts on belonging, partnership, and alarm clocks.


A new fandom for me. This came to me about 3.5 seconds after I woke up this morning and it had itself mostly-written before I was even fully conscious. ^^;; But I'm kind of fond of it, now. Hope you enjoy! ^_^  
  
Disclaimers: I don't own any of Youko Matsushita's stuff. If I did, her name wouldn't be all over it.  
Warnings: Written while barely conscious.  
  


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Morning Call  
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Something was making a noise.  
  
Actually, something was making a truly horrible racket. If it didn't stop soon he'd. . .and then he was out of the dream and into waking, and there beside his bed was no more terrible a noisemaker than his alarm clock, telling him to get up and go to work.  
  
Hisoka knew, from books and from half-overheard conversations over JuuOhChou's perpetually stale breakfast donuts, that the usual relationship to have with one's bedside timepiece was one of animosity if not outright fear. Most things he knew about people he knew from these sources; when he was alive there had not been the opportunities to learn these little things about life that most people took for granted. Until he died, he had never even had an alarm clock before.  
  
Well, there had probably been one by his bedside in the hospital, but no one had ever bothered to set it. There was no need for the dying to keep a schedule.  
  
So Hisoka knew now, in his eighteenth year of existence, what an alarm clock sounded like, and the human reaction to it. But apparently even in the afterlife he still had not mastered such human reactions. Hisoka smiled as he reached to push the button that would make the sound cease until the next morning. He would spend the rest of the day in his natural quiet, moving through his house and into the world without making a sound. He would rebuke his partner for the noise that made his head ache. Yet waking up to this daily aural assault did not bother him.  
  
Hisoka liked his alarm clock very much.  
  
When you had an alarm clock, it meant you had to be somewhere. Hisoka was expected at JuuOhChou. If he didn't arrive on time, Tatsumi would chastise him. Worse, his partner would call him and shout out all his worry in a blast of noise over the telephone that he always had to hold a foot away from his head. If he didn't arrive on time, there would be no donuts left (his partner would eat them), and he wouldn't bother to eat breakfast, and then he would be cranky for the rest of the day. Like millions of people all over the Meifu and living world both, Kurosaki Hisoka set his alarm clock because he had to go to work. He had a job to do, and it wasn't as if anyone else was going to do it.   
  
He was the only one in JuuOhChou who could use empathy. And he was the only one who could help Tatsumi-san clean up the mess when Watari put another "experiment" in the coffee and everyone else drank it _again_. He was the only one who could ease the Gushoushin out of their Tsuzuki-induced wrath by visiting them in the library and letting them talk to him about books. He was the only one in the world of the dead who could hit Tsuzuki and make him shut up. This was a very important job. Everyone else would either blow up like Terazuma or smile and give in (well, maybe Tatsumi-san didn't always smile). Keeping his partner in line was a job that only he could do.   
  
Being Tsuzuki's partner was a job that only he could do.  
  
That was what the alarm clock meant: it was the symbol of his new (after)life as a person who had a job, and people waiting for him to come in and do it. It wasn't as if he could just leave Tsuzuki alone. Or Watari, or the Gushoushin, or even Tatsumi-san. As he got out of bed, he caressed it lightly, a ghost touch. Nobody else in the Meifu knew it, but this beeping, blinking monstrosity was one of his most prized possessions.  
  
When you had an alarm clock, it meant you had somewhere to be.

  
  


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I would dearly love to hear any comments/thoughts. ^_^

I think Hisoka was hanging out in my subconscious because I read Amet's YnM fics () last night before bed. So I can see at least a snatch of inspiration from there (consider this credit-giving ^_~). Give 'em a shot--they're good stuff.


End file.
